Author: SW Fairbrother

Open call for submissions of flash fiction and poetry for a charity anthology

We’re seeking submissions of poetry and flash fiction for a charity anthology which will raise money for the Alf Dubs Children’s Fund.

Lord Alfred Dubs was rescued by the Kindertransport in 1939 and brought to Britain as a refugee when he was 6 years old. The fund’s aim is to help lone children refugees, protect them from traffickers, and get them to safety.

I’ve got two main projects on the go at the moment (and a couple of side ones). The first is The Hive, the long overdue third installment of the Vivia series. I’m not going to give you a date I expect to finish that because I keep doing that, and then missing it and feeling bad. I can promise that I’m working on it. The word count is going up a little every week, so it will be finished one of these days, unless I die young. (So pray for me).

The second is an anthology I’m curating and editing for charity. It’s a Sci Fi collection and will benefit the Alf Dubs Children’s Fund. They are a wonderful and worthy cause, so I suggest popping over to them and giving them money. They will do good things with it. That will be out later in the year.

The good news about that is that I’m contributing a story towards it on top of the editing. It’s going to take part in the same world as Oubliette, so if anyone was wondering what happened to Crabkie, it will be your chance to find out.

I’ve also got some other exciting news which I can’t share yet, but will do soon, so watch this space!

So, it’s come to my attention that it’s coming up to two years since I published A Murder of Crones and there’s still no third book out. That’s pretty bad. I struggle with motivation and procrastination and all sorts of other ‘tions which doesn’t help. Just a quick post to say that it’s not been forgotten. One day, once upon a time I will finished the damned thing.

Okay, firstly I apologise for doing the whole George R.R. Martin thing to anyone waiting for more books from me.

I took some time off from work to write The Secret Dead and A Murder of Crones, but now I am back to working full time. I am lucky enough to have an excellent day job (and have had enough awful ones to appreciate it), but it does mean that my available writing time has substantially diminished. I’m also not naturally a fast writer. I pick at it constantly.

Books are also pretty expensive to produce — covers, formatting, editing and so on, and putting out book three will likely cost more than I can afford. I’m going to look at doing a kickstarter or similar to cover the costs (I’ve got some great ideas for rewards), so if you’re interested in being notified when I’ve finally got my ass into gear enough to get it out there, sign up for my newsletter here.

A quick note to let you know that I am going to be withdrawing A Murder of Crones from sale through platforms other than Amazon. The reason for this is that I want readers to be able to borrow the book through Amazon’s Select programme.

I apologise to any readers wanting to read it in other formats, unfortunately Amazon requires exclusivity under their terms. I don’t like the exclusivity clause; it’s not fair to readers but I only had a handful of sales on platforms other than Amazon in the last year and it doesn’t make sense to keep it out of Select, where even more readers can access it.

I’m flying out to South Africa on holiday today (hooray!). I’ll have my laptop but I’m not sure how much opportunity I’ll have to use it and whether I’ll have Wi-Fi. So, I wish you all a happy Christmas and wonderful New Year way ahead of time.

**Warning: Floorboards doesn’t really have any huge twists but I will talk about what happens in the story below. Spoiler alert if you haven’t read it.**

Most of my work has an element of horror, but my story for the Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror anthology was the first time I attempted to write pure horror, rather than fantasy or scifi with a twist of horror.

I spent a long while trying to decide what I wanted to contribute because I wanted to do horror right. In the end, the question that came to mind was ‘ ‘Well, what scares me?’

I have had nightmares since I was a child. For those lucky enough not to get them, nightmares are lot more than just bad dreams. They are vivid, horrible and as real as if they had actually happened. My body reacts in a very real way, except because it’s a dream I don’t have the luxury of being able to try manage my thoughts and reaction.

Nightmares are a very pure and physical experience. Pure terror. Pure grief. Pure panic.
When I wake up, I tell myself it was just a dream, but it takes some time for my body to get the message. I can still hear the screaming in my ears. My heart is still racing. Adrenaline is still pumping. I have to get out of bed and distract my mind with something else – TV or a book — until my body gets the idea and stops panicking. It usually takes me a good few hours to calm down and go back to sleep.

Most of my nightmares involve the death of a loved one, usually in a gruesome manner. When I was younger, it was my sisters or my parents. Now that I’m parent myself, it’s my son.

So, when I thought about what truly scared me, it was my nightmares that came to mind. I didn’t want to write about people I love dying. I shove those memories away in the back of my head and I never want to revisit them.

Instead, Floorboards is based on one of the few recurring nightmares I have and one of the few that doesn’t involve a loved one.

****Spoilers from here on*****

The nightmare is very simple. There is a corpse buried somewhere in my house or garden. I know that I hid the body, and I know that whatever happened to them is my fault.
The nightmare is a combination of guilt because someone is dead because of me, and terror that I’m going to be found out. I never know who the corpse is or what I did, but I know it is a woman. That’s it.

If I were to try and psychoanalyse myself, I’d guess it’s something about insecurity and ‘being found’ out as a horrible person, or something. Who the hell knows?

The characters in Floorboards aren’t in the least bit real or based on anyone I know. I don’t know a Vicky. I had a happy childhood. I thought if I put some logic and reason to the nightmare and made it someone else’s experience, writing the nightmare might be a cathartic experience and make it a little less scary. It wasn’t. It was just a horrible thing to write and I’m glad it’s done. I’m not going to read it again.

I’m not sure what it is that makes my work take such a dark turn, but after Floorboards I’m going to try to write some happier stuff.

If anyone’s waiting for Book Three, it’s on its way. Someone reminded me that I promised it would be out Summer 2015, so I really need to update the back matter.

I’ve been distracted this year by other projects and Hive Memory has fallen sadly behind. It didn’t help that I have a real tendency to get too complicated with my plots, and I got a little off track. I’ve now simplified it substantially (split the story into two, so Book Four has a plan). I’m working on it now, but it’s unlikely to be out before the end of the year.

Jones had quite a bit of criticism about Pratchett, despite admitting that he hasn’t read any (although he ‘did flick through a book by him in a shop’). Well, there you go.

I can’t quote the utter head-in-assness of the thing in its entirety, but here are a few choice quotes:

‘Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.’

‘A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom’

By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying ‘mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction’

Not everyone is a fan of Terry Pratchett. Fair enough. There is no such a thing as an author everyone likes. Sir Terry is so popular that genuine literary criticism would have made an interesting read.

Jones’ article wasn’t literary criticism. It wasn’t anything other than pure snobbery and nastiness. He hasn’t read Pratchett and appears to be basing his dislike purely on the fact that Terry Pratchett is popular. The clear connotation is that any book worth reading couldn’t be appreciated by the rabble.

So what, you say. There are idiots in the world, and plenty of them are on the internet. This isn’t news.

Great literature has the power to change the world. Stories make us human. Stories are the reason we strive. Stories make us more than animals. Every great advance in human history happened because someone imagined the world could be different.

Popularity has nothing to do with whether something is great literature. Dickens was popular, so was Austen. And er…so is E.L. James.

Harry Potter is popular. Is it literature? I think so. Harry Potter fired millions of imaginations across the world and helped turn an entire generation of children into readers. Those children are now reading other books. Some are writing books. Maybe even books Jonathan Jones would approve of. Every time someone loses themselves in a book, it sparks that creativity and love of stories.

This is why Jonathan Jones is not only wrong, but his attitude is hugely damaging to great literature. All writers start small, even the great ones. Maybe one of those Harry Potter readers was made to feel ashamed of enjoying escapist fiction and that’s one more reader lost, one more writer.

I’m a writer. I run a writing group. I critique manuscripts on an almost daily basis. Good writers are insecure by nature. They question their assumptions, spend hours researching their topics and then pick over every sentence and every word. They’re never happy.

That’s part of the process of growing as a writer. We all have different levels of innate talent, but no one writes great literature in their first draft. The only way to become a great writer is to keep banging your head against that wall, fighting to make it better every step of the way.

I met a writer yesterday who described the necessity of having a ‘bubble of delusion’, which is a term I adore. Soft little writer souls need to believe that with enough work their books can be the wonderful thing they dream it will be. Some will never be great. Others will be. Attitudes like those of Jonathan Jones pop that bubble: that our precious little work in progress may never be good enough. That the writers we love aren’t ‘real’ authors. That even if we write as we dream, someone will come along with a sneer.

I know people will argue that if we truly love writing, we’ll do it no matter what some numpty on the internet says, but I don’t think that’s true. Writing is hard. Writing well is even harder and we need that bubble. It’s all too easy to give up.

If only the confident and the brash write books, the literary landscape would be depressingly dull. My experience is that the more confident the writer, the worse their book is. Neurosis appears to go hand-in-hand with good writing.

Book snobbery is hugely damaging. It puts people off reading. It puts writers off writing. It contributes nothing of value to the world.

And for the record? Terry Pratchett’s books changed my life, my beliefs and my perceptions. Maybe if Jones actually made the effort to read one, he’d realise he was wrong.

The twitterati have their knickers in a knot about this, and the comments over at the Grauniad are going strong. There’s already a change.org petition calling on Jones to apologise. I suspect the Graun will take a different tack. They’ll get him to read a Pratchett book and then write another article. I don’t care if he does. I don’t particularly want him to apologise either. My first thought was that Jones should stick to his guns and never read any Pratchett, but then I felt bad. That’s a terrible punishment for someone who claims to be a lover of great literature. No one deserves that, no matter how snobby they might be.